


Meanwhile in Thanalan

by J_C_D



Series: Kannadi Albedo [3]
Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Canon Compliant, During Canon, Gen, bad joke
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-17
Updated: 2021-02-17
Packaged: 2021-03-13 03:14:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29520003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/J_C_D/pseuds/J_C_D
Summary: Kannadi resolves to attend a banquet, but duty calls elsewhere.[How A Realm Reborn ended for her.]
Series: Kannadi Albedo [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2168502
Comments: 1
Kudos: 2





	Meanwhile in Thanalan

Kannadi furrowed her brows so deeply, they brushed the frameless lenses of her gold-trimmed glasses.

“A banquet? Tonight? But I have so much work to do.”

“You can put it aside for one evening, Kanna dear,” said the giantess under the blue crystal chandelier of Kannadi’s upstairs office floor.

“I’d appreciate it if you refrained from calling me that, cousin. It makes you sound like an old woman.”

Kannadi had given over the top floor of her home as a Flames branch office. In a few short weeks she had become instrumental in handling Ul’dah’s Hunt Marks – determining what needed culling where, based on a raft of ecological research and prior knowledge of the behaviors of beasts. Sylbryda glanced sidelong at the Immortal Flames private taking inventory of the drawers. The young man looked Gridanian and had the typical dull enthusiasm of a hireling; he fit well into the scenery with the smartly-cut drape of his leather coat.

Young Isaac noticed the malm-high gray roegadyn woman looking at him with silver-eyed assessment, as if determining whether and how to eat him. He returned to his work in a cloud of fluster.

“My apologies, cousin,” said Sylbryda, looking back.

“Apologize for that shirt,” Kannadi snipped from behind her desk and the layers of her two-tone brown and black office tabard. “It has drawstrings for a reason. This is a place of work.”

Sylbryda hooked her thumbs in her belt sash, tapped the toe of her boot on the black and white tiled floor, grinned like a shark and did positively nothing to cover the neckline that plunged past her sternum. _At least she has a brassiere under it this time,_ Kannadi noted.

“All work and no high society makes Kannadi a dull girl. You’d enjoy it.”

“I wouldn’t.” Kannadi returned her attention to her paperwork, blinked and looked back at Sylbryda. “Wait, banquets take days to prepare. Why am I only now hearing about it?”

“Possibly something to do with your priorities.” Sylbryda casually nudged a stack of paper on the desk. A very neat and complete stack.

“Composing Hunt Marks and coordinating them with foreign city-states is a task that needs doing,” Kannadi frowned, nudging the even edges of the stack back into near-perfect alignment. She lifted the whole stack and drop-tapped it on her desk for maximum symmetry. “A banquet among the wealthy really seems more up your alley, anyway.”

Sylbryda shook her head, waving her swept-back black hair. “You never know what that little gremlin might construe if he saw me.” She raised her voice toward the private and continued, “Best not to stir trouble among the nobility as a _recent arrival_ to Ul’dah, yes?”

Kannadi closed her eyes. “Will that be all, cousin? There’s work to do.”

Sylbryda shrugged, freeing her thumbs, and moved to the stairs. “Isn’t there always? People are flesh and bone, _cousin_. Careful you don’t work yourself to dust.”

Kannadi watched her descend before returning to work. A door opened and closed. Pen-scratching outlined the silence.

Isaac broke the silence after a minute with a hesitant stage whisper.

“Is your cousin single?”

Kannadi’s pen nub broke off in the desk.

That did it. That _did_ it.

She liked her work. She liked quiet evenings in solitary study and contemplation.

But Kannadi was going to be _damned_ if her own grandmother, age-reduced or otherwise, was going to attract more attention than she could.

She was going to go downstairs, find her best robe, slap herself about the face until she built up the courage, put on some makeup to cover the slap marks, and stride into that bedamned banquet like a Thorne-era princess.

She glared at the papers in her outbox. Her work was four days ahead. It would’ve been a week ahead or more, but reliable forecasts of weather and monster behavior didn’t extend more than two days, and she could only extrapolate so far beyond that.

“Cover for me, Isaac,” she said, throwing back her chair and practically dashing for the stairs. “I give myself time off!”

Kannadi had made it to the foot of her stairs when the door swung open. There stood one of her personal retainers, Lost Wax, short for a roegadyn and brown as wood. She snapped a salute, brushed some of her short hair behind her ear and shut the door.

“Glad I caught you. It’s a catastrophe!”

“What? What is?” Kannadi snapped.

“Um,” Lost Wax ummed, taken aback by her boss’s uncharacteristic outburst, “there was a dragon outbreak in Eastern Thanalan. Several seemed to come from one of the underground caverns.”

“What? What kind? Are they still present?”

“Mid-range, ma’am. They flew straight north, likely to Ishgard.” Lost counted consequences on her fingers. “As a result, their flight path spooked a sizeable heard of aldgoats, which set to stampeding over Highbridge, which upset the nesting condors, which immediately drew in a horde of qiqirn to scavenge eggs, which left their settlements open for snurbles to—”

“So what you’re saying is that there is a severe ecological imbalance.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“And as a result, the Hunt marks must needs be altered.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“The daily ones for the next four days, which include the recommendation for next week’s weekly.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Which has a deadline of tonight.”

“I believe so, ma’am.”

“And alterations must be made according to conditions on the ground, of course.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“About which there are at present only anecdotal accounts.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Who else is watching conditions out there?”

“Well, us, ma’am.”

“Us?”

“You and I, and Isaac if he’s still here, but he’s not quite the naturalist that I am. The rest of the staff is at some sort of banquet tonight.”

Kannadi blinked. “Why aren’t you?”

Lost shyly itched at the freckles on her cheekbones. “Well, one of the other Sons of St. Coinach invited me, but I knew _someone_ had to remain if you needed help.”

Kannadi stared into the middle distance. If the stampede was _across_ Highbridge, practically the whole east of Thanalan was surely in disarray…

She couldn’t just _not_ do her job, could she? How many people would really notice if she slapped a random monster on the hunt list and went to the banquet? Who would even know? Who would care?

She would.

“Ma’am?”

Kannadi jerked back to reality. “Yes? What?”

“Should I fetch Alcibiades from the stable?” Lost gestured her green eyes to the door.

Kannadi sighed.

“Fetch him, please. I suspect this will take a while.”

#

It had been a long afternoon and a long evening and, yes, a long night. Chases and coordinations preceded and followed yelling and note-taking. Camp Drybone couldn’t afford to get drier, so every last damn blasted damn foolish aldgoat out of its range had to be herded back across Highbridge before they drank every pool and befouled the rest. Several were already injured in territorial clashes with others of their kind, so the going was slow.

And so it was that at the time of the attempted coup of the Bloody Banquet, Kannadi Albedo spent twilight over Thanalan helping Lost Wax prod a surly nannygoat across a bridge.

By the time she returned to Ul’dah proper, it was so far into the night that it was morning.

Kannadi had no illusions of getting to sleep, not with the work yet ahead of her, so when she returned to the Goblet she took a long constitutional. She walked the residential district’s quiet bridges, quieter stairways, and quietest tunnels, washing her busy brain in the silence, drinking the volume of cool night air between herself and the nearest sound.

 _Odd_ …

After a state banquet which certain select adventurers could attend, she expected more revelry at the houses. Perhaps they were partied out.

She waited for sunrise at Raubahn’s Salute, the giant balcony daring to jut into the emptiness of the canyon. There was a good view of it from her estate, but Kannadi had never seen the space used. Perhaps its isolation, which she felt was its main feature, discouraged others from using it. Sound fell away into the canyon, leaving it an island of unsettling silence.

All the better. Kannadi considered the Salute a satellite of her estate, and basked in the serene quiet it provided.

As the sun began to rise, a break in the pattern of the stone railing caught her eye.

_Ah. Someone vandalized it with a chisel. Likely one of the earlier revelers._

Highly inappropriate behavior, that. The vandalism was surely something lewd. No need to read it.

She leaned forward and read it.

 _The Sound of Raubahn Clapping_ , it read.

Kannadi stared at it.


End file.
